An unexpected recurrence across my classes this semester has been a continuous discussion about how things come to be. Whether this is material or metaphorical, it bears surprising relevance when thinking about (you guessed it) context. In one of my classes, the content of a text is distinguished between the “verbal work” and the “material work”; the verbal work being the concept and existence of a body of work inside its creator’s mind, and the material work being every step of the physical production of said text.
What is so significant about the material work is that every step along the way to produce a physical copy is influenced by the possibility of error, human or otherwise. Even in modern book production there is a margin for error, and book printing in the past was subject to even more so. The manuscript passed through so many hands just to print words on paper, not to mention the work of binding those pages together. Perhaps there is a typo somewhere – or perhaps where the text is being produced is undergoing the unfortunate influence of censorship, muddling the “intent” of the author. I use quotes around intent here to acknowledge that there is no way of knowing, when considering texts, the specific intent behind content.
Toni Morrison touches upon this in Playing in the Dark, where she delves into an in-depth and heart-wrenchingly philosophical analysis of author biases. Whether subconscious or conscious, the “verbal work” is influenced by the sociocultural environment of the time. Whether this is through racialized language or other hierarchical values, these influences present, along with the fluctuating content of the material work, a greater contextual insight into broader contexts beyond the pages of the text itself.
Consider Ulysses: the process Joyce went through to transcribe the “verbal work” into the meticulously edited and revised versions of the “material work” was Herculean (don’t let Joyce know I think that). Part of the trials Joyce went through for Ulysses was due to censorship laws; others due to his physical health (which can in part be considered a “human error” influencing the material work). Take into account more ancient works like The Odyssey or The Iliad, which were originally entirely verbal performances. Although the time and quantity of recitations could have deviated the material from its original “verbal work”, transcribing these epics into versions of their “material works” surely subjected to them to all manner of errors; additionally, every translated edition contains slight variations that can impact the way a text is consumed. The ways that things are made, and specifically the context the making of things offers when trying to understand a work to the fullest, fascinates me thoroughly.